Household Gods

The worst of it was, she knew Julia was right. She shuddered just as Julia had. Even in Los Angeles, an abscessed molar wouldn’t have been fun. But a dentist in Los Angeles would have had novocaine or a general anesthetic for the pulling, and pain pills for the aftermath. She would have had antibiotics to shrink the abscess, and sterile instruments and rubber gloves and a surgical mask to keep infection away.

A Roman dentist wouldn’t be a she. A Roman dentist wouldn’t have any of those things, either antisepsis or analgesics.

And it didn’t matter. Whatever a dentist could do to her, it couldn’t possibly be worse than what her own tooth was putting her through. She shuddered again at the thought of what she faced tomorrow, but living with this hammering pain would be far, far worse.

She even thought, for a longish while, of finding someone to do the job tonight. But it was dark already, and rain was dripping off the eaves. From the sound of it, it was turning to sleet. No way she could venture out in that, nor was any dentist likely to want to try it, even if she’d had a way to get him over here without sending herself or one of her family out into the dark and the wet.

She had to get drunk before she could sleep that night. The wine didn’t make the pain go away, but it did shove it off to one side. As long as she didn’t have to stare it in the face, she could cope. Mostly. If she had another cup of the one-as wine. And another to chase that one down, because it tasted so godawful. Then a third, just because. And…

She woke long before sunrise. Her body was a perfect symmetry: a pounding headache exactly matched the toothache. She stumbled downstairs, lit a lamp with shaking hands, and drank another cup of wine. It tasted just as horrible as she’d expected. She poured another cup, but couldn’t bring herself to drink it. She nursed it instead, hunched miserably on a stool, until at long last a gray and leaden light filtered through the slats of the shutters.

Julia’s robust footfalls on the stairs beat a counterpoint to the pounding in her head and the throbbing in her mouth. She glowered at the freed-woman.

“Oh my,” Julia said. “It’s too bad the pestilence got Dexter. He was supposed to be very good at pulling teeth.”

Nicole wanted to knock Julia’s head off, and her bright, healthy voice with it, but she chose to focus instead on the words, and on the thoughts behind them. Focusing helped. “There’s that physician named Terentianus,” she said, “not far from the market square. I’ve gone by his place often enough.”

Julia shrugged. “I haven’t heard much about him, good or bad,“ she said. “If he’s still alive, you might as well try him. They’re all pretty much the same.”

That wasn’t true in L.A. It was sure to be an even greater lie in Carnuntum, which had no licensing arrangements of any sort. Here, if you hung out a sign and said you were a doctor, you were. Even the good doctors here were pathetically bad. The bad doctors were right out of the ballpark.

But Nicole didn’t have an awful lot of choice. Her tooth had grown worse as the morning went on. Her whole body ached in sympathy. “If he’s still breathing,” she said, “I’ll try him.”

He was in the shop – office didn’t quite seem to fit – that she’d seen so often: a skinny little man with a nose that looked even larger than it was, because the rest of him was so small. He greeted Nicole with a nearsighted scowl and an audible sigh as she told him her trouble. “Step out into the light and let me see,” he said.

Passersby veered off course and paused to gape while Terentianus positioned her in a convenient patch of sunlight – imagine; sunlight, and she was in too much pain to enjoy it – and peered into her mouth. “Yes,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Yes, yes. Bad, very bad. I’m afraid – yes, it will have to come out.”

“Why should you be afraid?” she snapped. “It’s not your tooth.”

He looked startled, but then he laughed. He had a remarkably pleasant and infectious laugh. “Oh!” he said. “Good, that’s very good. I’ll have to remember it.” Which meant, no doubt, that he’d be boring people with it for the next twenty years. After a brief pause, he added, “My fee is one denarius. Payable in advance.”

Nicole had had the forethought to bring a purse with her – no health insurance here. She laid four sesterces in his waiting hand. As they disappeared into the depths of his belt pouch, she said, “I don’t suppose anybody ever wants to pay you afterwards.”

“Not likely,” he agreed dolefully. Then he gave her a prescription that no twentieth-century dentist would have resorted to: “You see Resatus’ tavern there, across the street? Go on over. Drink three cups of wine, neat, as fast as you can. Then come back. I’ll give you a draught of poppy juice. As soon as that takes effect, I’ll pull the tooth.”

He wanted her as numb as she could get. She gave him credit for that.